August 4, 2026

02d Agit-Prop

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Excerpt from www.washingtonexaminer.com

President Joe Biden underscored his record with labor union workers as he announced new, higher tariffs on Chinese imports, including a 100% rate on electric vehicles.

“I’m determined that the future of electric vehicles will be made in America by union workers,” Biden told a crowd on Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden.

Hurrying through his remarks, held under the threat of rain, Biden also criticized former President Donald Trump for his trade policy, contending Trump’s deal with China did not increase U.S. exports.

“Now, Trump and MAGA Republicans want across-the-board tariffs on all imports from all countries,” he said. “Well, that would drive up costs for families on an average of $1,500 per year each year. He simply doesn’t get it.”

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Excerpt from www.msnbc.com

Billionaire Trump backer and major TikTok investor Jeff Yass has been exposed as the key financier behind a right-wing group known for investigating and intimidating liberals. CNBC reports Yass is a significant investor in the group “Accuracy in Media,” an organization that’s been behind recent efforts to dox and disrupt pro-Palestinian demonstrators on college campuses. In a press release responding to the news, the watchdog group Accountable.US expounded on the work Accuracy in Media does, noting it specializes in “sting operations and propaganda campaigns” and comparing the group to the beleaguered right-wing organization Project Veritas. I’ve grown quite suspicious of Yass’ aspirations when it comes to media. His opposition to a TikTok ban (paired with an interesting uptick of pro-Trump content on the app) and his involvement in dubious organizations like Accuracy in Media suggest he’s deeply interested in tools that can be used to manipulate and misinform the public.

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Excerpt from crooksandliars.com

On Tuesday, Biden announced an increase in tariffs on a variety of Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, solar cells, semiconductors, and advanced batteries, to protect strategic American industries from a new wave of competitors that the President said were unfairly subsidized by Beijing, according to the New York Times. Of course, Trump grabbed credit for that, and he was all about tariffs, but at the same time, he criticized Biden for it from the courthouse because, of course he did.

“They’ve also got to do it on other vehicles, and they have to do it on a lot of other products,” he told reporters before entering court for his hush money/election interference trial in New York. “Because China’s eating our lunch right now. … They have to do it on much more than electric vehicles.”

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Excerpt from www.rawstory.com

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems intent on strangling the life out of the Constitution to give Donald Trump authoritarian powers, according to a state Supreme Court justice.

Hawaii Supreme Court justice Todd Eddins has been an outspoken critic of the nation’s top court, which he said had abandoned legal precedent to impose their personal preferences and political theories to decide cases, and he told Slate columnists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern that these decisions put democracy at risk.

“You know, when precedent is for suckers and we don’t know whether settled law will become unsettled every June, it’s really hard for the judiciary to function,” Eddins said. “It’s hard for judges to operate when there’s a lack of stability. And it’s not just judges; it’s the litigants, the lawyers, the law professors who have to tear up their syllabuses. I mean, it’s fundamental to our American system of justice that law works incrementally, that cases build upon cases, and that we rely on precedent. That’s the stability of the law. And when you have a group of people who come in and disregard precedent, it really unsettles things; it causes chaos. People don’t know how to operate.”

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Excerpt from lidblog.com

 

The Washington Post is warning all you rubes out there that you need to stop using hot water because we need to save the earth… or something.

That’s right, folks, you low down, rabble need to stop valuing your comfort, your nice hot showers, and you hot-water to clean your dishes and clothing. How water is destroying the earth, dont’cha know?

Take the word of Allyson Chiu of the Washington Post. She knows better than you do, of course.

Just look at this nonsense:

You may not be giving a second thought to setting your washing machine on the hot cycle, cranking your showers to a steamy temperature or scrubbing your dirty dishes under a stream of scalding water.

If you did, you’d find that you probably don’t need to use so much hot water — and that you could be saving energy and cutting your utility bills. Water heating is responsible for more than 10 percent of both annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs, the biggest share after air conditioning and heating, according to the Energy Department. An American household uses an average of 64 gallons of hot water a day — close to the amount needed to fill an average bathtub — by doing laundry, showering, washing the dishes and running kitchen and bathroom faucets.

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Excerpt from www.sciencedaily.com

The latest edition of Florida Atlantic University’s “Florida Climate Resilience Survey,” found that 90% of Floridians believe that climate change is happening. In comparison, a recent Yale University survey showed 72% of all Americans believe climate change is happening. The FAU survey includes questions on beliefs about climate change, experience with extreme weather events and support for climate-related policies.

The Florida Climate Resilience Survey also shows belief in human-caused climate change has surged among Florida Independents while slipping among Republicans in the state since last fall.

But despite these changes, the latest edition of the survey found enduring support among Floridians for increased government action to address the consequences of a warming planet. The survey found 68% of all respondents want state government to do more and 69% want the federal government to do more to address climate change, a finding consistent with previous surveys.

“Floridians support strengthening our resilience to the effects of climate change because they are experiencing it. The urgency to act means debate over causes is largely irrelevant,” said Colin Polsky, Ph.D., founding director of FAU’s School of Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sustainability (ECOS), a professor in geosciences, and director of the FAU Center for Environmental Studies (CES) within the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

Michael Cohen has drawn praise so far for being a calm, credible, and poised witness, but the powerful way that he closed his testimony did major damage to Trump.

Harry Litman posted about the end of Cohen’s testimony:
“Do you have any regrets about your past work and association w/ Trump”
I do. I regret doing things for him I should not have. lying. bullying people. I don’t regret working w/ them — some interesting and great times. but to keep the loyalty and do the things he asked me to do. I violated my moral compass and I suffered the penalty as did my family.”

NO FURTHER QUESTIONS

Up next for Cohen is cross examination by the defense, and then redirect by the prosecution. The Trump defense case is expected to be quick and maybe consist of two witnesses at most. There have been no plans for Trump to testify.

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Excerpt from www.breitbart.com

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said Tuesday on “The View” that the Senate Republicans who voted not to impeach former President Donald Trump were enabling his un-American “lies about the election.”

Stephanopoulos said, “I think the most important thing that people should understand go this election is how far from normal it is. We have never had a former president, presidential candidate who was impeached then indicted for trying to overturn an election. Never in all of our history, we’ve never had a former president, a presidential candidate who lies about the election that he lost. We’ve never had a former president or presidential candidate who refuses to pledge to accept the results of the next election if he lost. You know, the peaceful transfer of power is the most fundamental tenet of our democracy. Refusing to accept it is un-American. I believe it’s unconstitutional and I think it’s the job of the media to put that in context.”

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Excerpt from www.newsbusters.org

The staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host of ABC’s The View, Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) was again allowed into the New York courtroom for former President Trump’s hush money trial and reported back to the Cackling Coven her shocking findings. Last week, she was startled by Trump’s “radioactive orange” face. This time, she was rocking brand new “binoculars” with which she deduced that there were too many white people in the courtroom.

According to the race-obsessed co-host, there were too many white people and her job was to “give a little color to the courtroom.” Even moderator Whoopi Goldberg wanted her to walk it back:

HOSTIN: I was! I was in the courtroom again yesterday. Yes, thank you.

[Applause]

Thank you. What I want to do is give a little color to the courtroom, because a lot of people –

GOLDBERG: Oh, redo that.

HOSTIN: No, no, a little color. I mean that literally and figuratively.

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Excerpt from www.infowars.com

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos proclaimed Tuesday that the “Deep State is packed with patriots” who “don’t care about political parties.”

What an odd thing to say, especially considering the media and Democrats for years had dismissed the existence of the Deep State as a conspiracy theory.

Stephanopoulos made the remarks on The View while discussing his book where he interviewed many bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies and military.

“Some people like to call those people the Deep State. Well, the big thing I learned doing this book is that the Deep State is packed with patriots,” he said.

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Excerpt from www.washingtonexaminer.com

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is cashing in on Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York just hours after appearing alongside the former president as he entered the Manhattan courthouse for the fifth week of his first criminal trial.

Shortly after making remarks outside the courthouse, during which Johnson decried the charges as being politically motivated and corrupt, the House speaker’s political action committee sent out a fundraising email touting his defense of the former president. The email accuses Democrats of using Trump’s trial to interfere with the 2024 election, urging supporters to chip in to end the “political hit job.”

“President Donald Trump is on trial for one reason and one reason only: to interfere with our election. Democrats are weaponizing the justice system to defeat him,” the missive states. “Democrats are putting their fingers on the scales to interfere with an election they know they’d otherwise lose. They know they can’t beat him at the ballot box … The stakes could not be any higher. The future of our country is on the line.”

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Excerpt from www.politico.com

Republicans aren’t working hard to claim the seats of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), even after their high-profile corruption-related indictments. But the GOP is laying plans to hang their legal problems around the necks of their Democratic colleagues.

In a year when the party faces a notably favorable Senate map replete with opportunities in more purple states, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is not making a play in New Jersey (good news for Rep. Andy Kim!). But the GOP’s Senate campaign arm is homing in on Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in a bid to build Menendez’ indictments into a larger narrative that Democratic incumbents are ethically challenged.

“Bob Menendez’ comical level of corruption has brought political self-dealing to the forefront of voters’ minds. That is bad news for Bob Casey and Jon Tester, because they both have serious vulnerabilities on corruption and ethics issues,” NRSC spokesperson Mike Berg said in a statement to POLITICO.

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Excerpt from www.thewrap.com

Audiences for The Walt Disney Company’s annual upfronts presentation were warned that Jimmy Kimmel wouldn’t be holding back in his roast of the company, and he made good on that promise. Kimmel ended the Tuesday afternoon session by going after everyone from current CEO Bob Iger to former CEO Bob Chapek.

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Excerpt from redstate.com

It happens frequently – weather reports promise bad activity in your area and then you awaken to clear skies and no activity. Meteorologists have little in the way of accountability, as they get to wave off their off-target predictions with explanations of an unforeseen atmospheric influence leading to their faulty forecast; somehow their inability to predict what threw off their prediction is excusable, and they go back to promising what will happen next.

The mainstream press loves to behave in this same fashion, and we saw this play out last week with another prediction of inclement legalities when Stormy Daniels testified in the Donald Trump business accounting trial. The former porn star took the stand, and her gripping, weepy accounts of her time spent with the then-mogul and future politician had the press all atitter. That this case has itself become a laughingstock was already evident, but the very fact that she took the stand was just another risible layer to the proceedings.

This is a case that normally would warrant, at most, a misdemeanor charge. But Alvin Bragg is following through on his campaign brag to punish Donald Trump, elevating his charges to a felonious case. The Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission had previously looked over the accusations and waved them off, which was the first sign that this is all a sham.

The press wants you to think otherwise. The preamble to the Stormy appearance was full of promise that she would bring down Trump. This was laughable. She was already a compromised witness, had previously lost in court to the man, and what she could possibly reveal concerning the charges was negligible at best. That level of objectivity however was scant to be found in the media.

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Excerpt from insidethemagic.net

Governor Ron DeSantis has applauded and cheerfully joked about the swift police action that recently took place at the gates of The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, the site of many of his legal battles.

Image Credit: Inside The Magic

DeSantis and Disney: The Many Battles

As a politician, Ron DeSantis has long defined himself by his opposition to his foes. Broadly speaking, that has meant he promotes himself as fighting against vague “woke” forces, the “liberal agenda,” and things like worker protections and child labor laws.

But for much of the last year, Governor DeSantis was locked in a multi-layered war with The Walt Disney Company, one of the world’s most beloved media corporations and the largest single-site employer in the state of Florida (thanks to Walt Disney World). The feud was kicked off when former Disney CEO Bob Chapek publicly opposed the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law, formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Act, which led to swift retaliation from the governor.

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Excerpt from www.nytimes.com

The bargain with Ms. Daniels, hashed out in the campaign’s final month, was less smooth. Mr. Pecker refused to pay her, putting the onus on Mr. Trump, and therefore Mr. Cohen. When Mr. Trump was slow to decide, hoping the threat would subside after Election Day, Mr. Cohen said that he used every imaginable excuse to stall Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, even the holiest of Jewish holidays — Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

“I was following directions,” Mr. Cohen explained.

But Ms. Daniels became impatient and threatened to walk away, prompting Mr. Cohen to pay out of his own pocket. Mr. Cohen said he told Mr. Trump “immediately” once he closed the deal, an assertion backed up by phone records.

“I was doing everything that I could and more in order to protect my boss,” Mr. Cohen told the jury, “which was something I had done for a long time.”

It paid off. Mr. Trump won the election a few days later.

But Mr. Cohen lost his patience when Mr. Trump did not award him a job in Washington, and gave him what he felt was an insultingly small bonus. He conveyed his anger to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, who promised that Mr. Trump would boost the bonus and reimburse him for the hush money.

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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com

Changes in how the UN calculates Gaza’s casualties have been cited as evidence of bias. They aren’t.

Has the UN really said fewer people were killed by Israel in Gaza?

No, is the short answer.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published on May 8 an infographic that referred to a figure of 34,844 total Palestinian deaths.

Below that, it said of the deaths: “24,686 identified as of 30 April as: 10,006 men, 4,959 women, 7,797 children, 1,924 elderly”.

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Excerpt from trendingpoliticsnews.com

ABC’s “The View” co-hosts expressed their growing concern on Monday that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s high-profile trial against former President Donald Trump might actually be boosting his 2024 presidential campaign. The trial, centered on Trump’s plea of not guilty to 34 counts related to falsifying business records, has dominated headlines, overshadowing other significant news items.

Ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, testified on Monday in the case alleging hush money payments made to actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. As the prosecution wraps up its list of witnesses, anticipation builds around the defense’s forthcoming arguments.

Drama also unfolded on the set of “The View,” where the co-hosts debated the trial’s unintended media repercussions. Sara Haines highlighted the media’s obsessive coverage, noting, “I would say when you say the Biden campaign has to get more active, I actually blame the media slightly. We talked last week a lot about how I don’t think people are able to watch this Trump trial 24-7. Now we’re talking about we’re in a campaign.”

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

President Biden will hold a real infrastructure week to highlight the historic progress America has made on infrastructure during his administration.

Here are some of Biden’s infrastructure accomplishments, according to a White House fact sheet:

  • Launched improvements on over 257,000 miles of roads and launched nearly 13,000 bridge repair projects making our roadways safer and reconnecting communities across the country;
  • Provided funding to deploy nearly 3,000 low-and zero-emission American-made transit buses and funded over 5,000 clean school buses in 600 communities across the country, prioritizing disadvantaged areas;

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Excerpt from www.washingtonexaminer.com

Michael Cohen offered the strongest evidence to date linking former President Donald Trump to the charges he is facing in New York, serving as either a blessing or a curse to prosecutors, depending on whether the jury finds their troubled star witness credible.

Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, testified Monday during Trump’s trial that the former president knew every step of the way how Cohen was working to prevent porn star Stormy Daniels from going public right before the 2016 election with a claim that she had a sexual encounter with Trump.

Prosecutors presented evidence that Cohen had two phone calls with Trump right before Cohen went to the bank to use a shell company to wire Daniels’s attorney $130,000 as part of a settlement agreement.

“I wanted to ensure that, once again, he approved what I was doing because I require approval from him on all of this,” Cohen said of the two calls.

Michael Cohen testifies on the witness stand in Manhattan criminal court about the calculations that Alan Weisselberg made to determine how to pay back Cohen for the money he paid to Stormy Daniels, Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)

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Excerpt from www.thenation.com

Trump’s former lawyer described in court how the former president demands total sycophancy from his underlings.

Michael Cohen, former president Donald Trump’s former attorney, arrives at his home after leaving Manhattan Criminal Court on May 13, 2024, in New York City.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

The third week of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan kicked off with the testimony of a familiar Trumpworld figure: former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen’s turn on the stand has been hotly anticipated since the trial got underway last month, since he’s able to directly confirm key details in the prosecution’s case, chiefly concerning the logistics of the payoff to former porn star Stormy Daniels in order to suppress her story of an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.

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Excerpt from www.bostonglobe.com

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined fellow GOP members of Congress to announce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require those registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of US citizenship.

Never mind that for nearly 30 years, noncitizens have been explicitly banned from voting in federal elections.

Nor are Republicans entirely ignoring the lack of data to support their claims. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said during the press conference. “This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states.”

How convenient and unoriginal it is to use intuition to ignore facts. “The speaker said that this question is unanswerable and relied on his intuition, but in fact, the question is very answerable,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “And it’s been answered many times, in that there is not a serious problem with noncitizen voting in the United States.”

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Excerpt from www.bnnbloomberg.ca

(Bloomberg) — Using Facebook in the lead-up to the US 2020 presidential election might have increased the chances of someone voting for Donald Trump, university researchers said in a study published Monday in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As part of the study, the researchers asked nearly 19,900 Facebook and 15,600 Instagram users to stop using the platforms ahead of the 2020 election. The authors, led by Stanford University professors Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, found some evidence suggesting that people who used Facebook might have been more likely to vote for Trump. They noted that their finding fell “just short” of being statistically significant.

“So we need to take it with a grain of salt,” Gentzkow said in a statement. “But if it’s real, it’s big enough that it could impact the outcome of a close election.”

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Excerpt from www.politicususa.com

President Biden is taking action to protect American jobs from Chinese cheating in markets like steel and semiconductors.

The White House announced via a fact sheet:

Today’s actions to counter China’s unfair trade practices are carefully targeted at strategic sectors—the same sectors where the United States is making historic investments under President Biden to create and sustain good-paying jobs—unlike recent proposals by Congressional Republicans that would threaten jobs and raise costs across the board. The previous administration’s trade deal with China failed to increase American exports or boost American manufacturing as it had promised.

Under President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs have been created and new factory construction has doubled after both fell under the previous administration, and the trade deficit with China is the lowest in a decade—lower than any year under the last administration. We will continue to work with our partners around the world to strengthen cooperation to address shared concerns about China’s unfair practices—rather than undermining our alliances or applying indiscriminate 10 percent tariffs that raise prices on all imports from all countries, regardless whether they are engaged in unfair trade. The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes the benefits for our workers and businesses from strong alliances and a rules-based international trade system based on fair competition.

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Excerpt from arstechnica.com

An Australian federal court sided with Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting an Australian safety regulator’s request to extend a temporary order blocking a terrorist attack video from spreading on Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter).

The video showed a teen stabbing an Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel—whose popular, sometimes controversial TikTok sermons often garner millions of views—during a church livestream that rapidly spread online.

Police later determined it was a religiously motivated terrorist act after linking the 16-year-old charged in the stabbing to a group of seven teens “accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney,” AP News reported. Bishop Emmanuel has since reassured his followers that he recovered quickly and forgave the teen, Al Jazeera reported.

In April, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, had cited Australia’s Online Safety Act and asked X to remove 65 posts showing footage from the attack, Reuters reported, but X refused to remove the posts.

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Excerpt from www.nytimes.com

Minutes after it became clear that Javier Milei had been elected president of South America’s second-largest nation in November, Elon Musk posted on X: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.”

Since then, Mr. Musk has continued to use X, the social network he owns, to boost Mr. Milei. The billionaire has shared videos of the Argentine president attacking “social justice” with his 182 million followers. One doctored image, which implied that watching a speech by Mr. Milei was better than having sex, is among Mr. Musk’s most viewed posts ever.

Mr. Musk has helped turn the pugnacious libertarian into one of the new faces of the modern right. But offline, he has used the relationship to press for benefits to his other businesses, the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.

“Elon Musk called me,” Mr. Milei said in a television interview weeks after taking office. “He is extremely interested in the lithium.”

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Excerpt from www.wsiltv.com

(CNN) — Rudy Giuliani was suspended from New York City radio station WABC and his talk show canceled after he flagrantly ignored orders not to discuss false 2020 election conspiracy theories, the station’s owner said Monday.

Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump lawyer who has hosted a daily talk show on the AM station for three years, was pulled from the airwaves Friday after he repeated bogus claims of vote rigging in the 2020 presidential election.

In recent months, Giuliani was repeatedly directed to not make claims of electronic voting manipulation surrounding the 2020 election, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire GOP donor and owner of the radio station, said in a statement.

Catsimatidis said the station received a letter in January 2021 from election technology company Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the target of baseless vote rigging claims by right-wing media figures, including Giuliani. WABC instructed its on-air hosts, including Giuliani, to avoid the subject, Catsimatidis said.

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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com

Washington, DC – In a report released on Friday, the United States concluded that it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it provided to Israel during its war on Gaza have been used in violation of international humanitarian law.

However, the same report said that Israel’s assurances that it is not using US arms to commit abuses are “credible and reliable” — and that the US can therefore continue to provide those weapons.

Advocates say the apparent contradiction shows that the US is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to continue arming Israel, even at the expense of Washington’s own laws.

“What those inconsistencies show you is that the administration does know what is happening,” said Annie Shiel, the US advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC).

“They absolutely can see that there is devastating civilian harm, that there are apparent violations, that aid is being restricted. And they do not have the political will to do what that means — and end US support and US arms transfers to Israel.”